Roni Schuetz, a Swiss and Israeli national, is an IT project manager, enterprise architect and software engineer. He works as software engineer with over 18 years of professional experience with scripting and object-oriented languages on multiple platforms. Currently he is mainly focusing on RESTful (ROA) and Service (SOA) Oriented Architectures, Enterprise Software / Architecture and RESTful Web Services in the transportation industry.

The .NET Framework from Microsoft provides services to application developers that are necessary to quickly create scalable solutions that meet stringent requirements for security, manageability and productivity. This whitepaper introduces the guiding principles and thoughts behind the .NET Framework, the core features of the Common Language Runtime and its supporting Framework Base Class Libraries and how it is evolving in the next major version.

The Microsoft Common Language Runtime (CLR) and the .NET Framework class libraries – collectively called the .NET Framework – were designed to enable developers to easily create scalable, secure, interoperable and manageable applications that can also leverage existing investments in other technologies and platforms. The .NET infrastructure works with non-Microsoft technologies through its built-in support for creating and consuming Web services, and it works with existing Microsoft technologies by providing native integration with COM components. These features help to extract further value from an organization’s existing investments in prior technologies and ensure interoperability with other platforms.

Since the earliest days of software development, organizations have sought to build applications quickly and with higher quality – that is fewer bugs. Applications should also interoperate with different environments and technologies and should be built with widely-accepted languages that are easy to learn and maintain, simultaneously boosting productivity. Many approaches have appeared to try to improve the development process, but often these efforts have been focused on the analysis and design phase. It is not until more recently that the underlying architecture of the development platform itself has achieved a prominent role in laying the groundwork for building enterprise applications.

Whether an enterprise is concerned with interoperability with Web services or COM applications, building solutions more quickly and with fewer bugs, or using a common programming model across application types and languages, the .NET Framework provides organizations the tools to meet all these goals and more.